Even assuming it’s right, I don’t like this article. Not because of the claims it makes, but rather because of the implications it makes—or doesn’t care to avoid.
Organic farming is essentially the idea of farming more ‘in line with nature’, and is concretely defined and regulated by different laws in different places. If these regulations aren’t yielding the expected results, it may be a good idea to drop or improve them. What I find dangerous, though, is the easily acquirable belief that the idea of organic farming is deceptive and worthless.
Certain practices present in conventional farming are known to be problematic and it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned and seek to avoid them. Organic farming can miss the goal, but my understanding is that it’s aiming in the right direction. Therefore, I think a more responsible conclusion to draw would be ‘today’s organic farming isn’t what it should be’, not just the plain ‘organic foods are not superior’. In this form, I fear the message does far more harm than good.
Is it because the new flag is better, or is it really because some sort of a movement has formed around it? In other words, would the new flag have been this popular if it had already been the official flag, or does it owe its success to its role as the sleek, new, modern thing trying to displace the old and outdated design? I feel like this could be an important factor.
It does. Run `winecfg` and see ‘Folders’ under the ‘Desktop Integration’ tab. Wine used to link these to directories in your home directory by default; not sure if that’s still the case, but you can definitely change it.
> The question remains. Where do you draw the line? What are the rules?
These questions absolutely remain, but their scope is not nearly as wide as some people here make it out to be. Of course, narrowing it down further might be nice.
People taking ‘usually right’ as ‘100% true fact’ sounds like a pretty big issue to me. Of course, it’s the people who must learn to know and mind the distinction, first and foremost.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with using AI and it's something we should be celebrating.
In many cases, there are clear disadvantages to using AI, be it the effect on human psyche, the considerable resource consumption, the style of the output, or the fact that the resulting work was not authored by a person, which is a very subjective preference, but one that many people have nevertheless.
I agree that AI is a great technological achievement, but it’s not as if great technological achievements don’t come with any downsides. Celebrating them is reasonable, but also situational.
None of these amount to AI making something. Before AI, it’s been humans who put the words on the paper, who put the strokes on the canvas, who put the notes on the sheet. Spell-checking and auto-completion have existed before AI and do not fundamentally change the process.
Since this project singles out AI (likely generative AI using machine learning), it seems evident to me that it rules out any involvement which does fundamentally change the process, i.e. what people otherwise do when creating.
(Yes, one could argue that e.g. word processing or printing have also fundamentally changed the process, and that is absolutely true, but each of those has changed the process differently than machine learning has, and clearly this website considers the changes made by AI undesirable in some ways, not the changes made by word processing or printing.)
You can care about some issues more than you care about others, or only speak out against some of them. I don’t think anyone is (or can be reasonably expected to be) speaking out about every single atrocity happening in the world. That doesn’t mean they don’t care about human rights. People are nuanced. It’s not all or nothing.
The idea of free software follows from fairly simple logic: You should be in control of your computer and any software that runs on it should be distributed under form and licence which facilitate this. It’s not about what the software wants or how much work people owe you; it’s about enabling you to own your computing when the code is literally already there. Surely you can disagree with that without making up (in my view) silly-sounding arguments for the other side?
Wow, thank you for the detailed answer! I understand your point much better now.
I still think ‘kills any sort of multiplayer games’ (what the other dev said) is a gross exaggeration, since you list some ways this could be made to work, but it sounds like some things would cost significantly more resources and need to be done differently. But hey, maybe that’s not necessarily a bad thing. (Plus, there are multiplayer games which aren’t quite as resource-intensive on the server side.)
The point I was trying to make is that understanding and modifying software to do your bidding is significantly more feasible if you already have the source code than if you have to reverse-engineer it yourself, to an important degree.
As not a game dev myself, may I ask for clarification? How does ‘Stop Killing Games’ legislation kill any sort of multiplayer games specifically? Aren’t there already games which don’t have the problem the movement is trying to solve? Wouldn’t it only require action from you if you were trying to kill multiplayer in the first place? I feel like I may have misunderstood your point or am just lacking a lot of important insight.
> You also always have control over the programs that run on your own computer. Reverse engineer it if you care; the tools have always been there.
It’s never been about what’s possible in theory, but what’s feasible in practice. By the same kind of logic you apply here, every country in the world is as good as democratic because you can work your way to free elections eventually, even if it takes a while.
Yes! And there are many other re-implementation projects, like OpenMW, OpenGothic, fheroes2, and others, which allow you to play the games if you can provide the original assets. Largely for older games, but the point stands.
> […] in practice exactly one person will buy the game that cost millions to produce, put it up on a website for free, and then the studio will say "well, never doing that again".
This is exactly what has been happening for years, only illegally. If it became legal, I imagine far less people would end up buying the game, though probably still more than just one.
But again, games are more than just software, so the four freedoms do not enable this.
* https://darcs.net/
* https://mercurial-scm.org/